Writing Craft

What if your villain was your story’s protagonist? This is the question my super-amazing screenwriting friend Erik Martinez asked me over Skype last week and it exploded my brain. I was struggling with my YA Fantasy work-in-progress THE NEVERS. I knew I hadn’t developed my villain the way I needed to. I knew I was…

I am super excited to announce that I will be a faculty member for the Pneuma Creative Writing Retreat this October! If you’ve ever dreamed of working with me in person and picking my brain for three days as we sip wine and gawk at the gorgeous New England trees – this is your chance!…

Have you heard of this fancy MFA creative writing term called profluence? Proflu-whaaaaaat? Yep, it’s a complete mouthful! Profluence is a big scholarly MFA word that I’d never heard of until I was in creative writing school. It’s coined by John Gardner and it refers to the overall connective tissue, flow and energy of your novel,…

You know those scenes that you LOOOOOOOVE, but you feel like you can’t cut? You know the ones. They’re the scenes that turn you into a frothing angry velociraptor when someone suggests you might cut them. The scenes your beta-readers keep mentioning might not be necessary, and you’ve pretty much lost all faith in your beta readers…

Writers are asked for writing advice all the time. They’re asked on panels and interviews and by strangers they’ve hardly met. And you’ve probably heard plenty of stock answers like … Make sure you read as much as you can! Get your butt in your chair and finish your book! Write from your heart. Write…

The film MOONLIGHT claimed top prizes by winning the Academy Awards for best picture and best screenplay last month. This film is brilliant. And in my opinion, much of that brilliance comes from the fact that it broke so MANY conventional writing “rules” that we’ve been told again and again. It broke those rules –…

The number one thing I learned from screenwriting is story structure. Robert McKee, author of STORY, explains that there are two kinds of talent: story talent and literary talent. Most writers focus on literary talent … which are the words, the phrases, and how you use them. Often, literary talent is what we’re taught in creative…

I have a huge announcement for everyone! For over a year I’ve been thinking about doing this … and despite all my fears and the imposer-syndrome devil sitting on my shoulder, I’ve decided to get out of my comfort zone and jump into the deep end. I’ve created a YouTube channel! My channel is called: Ingrid’s Notes:…

Self-publishing used to be considered a vanity choice, but with the current flux of the book industry, independent publishing has blossomed into an exciting new market. Independent authors are taking control of their own publishing careers and becoming entrepreneurs who write, market, and publish. It’s the wild wild west of publishing with a wide variety of results,…

“Writing makes our brains pretend to have a sensory experience, but it’s not really having one.” This was the kick-off statement at one of the AWP writer’s conference panels I attended in March. It stopped me in my tracks, making me realize other art forms – music, paintings, film – are all true sensory experiences. Whereas…